In the Heart of the Sea

they were to keep on sailing and make no attempt to find the missing crew. “We, however, concluded on this occasion to make a small effort,” Chase remembered, “which, if it did not immediately prove the means of restoring the lost boat, we would discontinue, and again make sail.”
    So Chase and Joy lowered their sails and waited. The minutes stretched on, and Chase loaded his pistol and fired. Nothing. After a full hour of bobbing in the dark, the two boat-crews reluctantly set sail, assuming they would never again see their captain and his men.
    Early the next morning, someone saw a sail, two miles to the leeward. Chase and Joy immediately altered course, and soon all three crews were reunited. Once again, their destinies were, in Chase’s words, “involuntarily linked together.”
    It was on this day, the eighteenth since leaving the wreck, that the men’s thirst and hunger reached a new, agonizing level. Even the stoic Chase was tempted “to violate our resolution, and satisfy, for once, the hard yearnings of nature from our stock.” Raiding their stores, however, would be a death sentence: “[A] little reflection served to convince us of the imprudence and unmanliness of the measure, and it was abandoned with a sort of melancholy effort of satisfaction.”
    Just to make sure that no one was tempted to steal any of the bread, Chase transferred the provisions to his sea chest. Whenever he slept, he made sure to have an arm or a leg draped across it. He also kept the loaded pistol at his side. For a man from the Quaker island of Nantucket, it was an unusual display of force. Nickerson’s impression was that “nothing but violence to his person” would have induced the first mate to surrender the provisions. Chase decided that if anyone should object to his method of rationing, he would immediately divide up the hardtack into equal portions and distribute it among the men. If it came down to giving up his own stock, he was “resolved to make the consequences of it fatal.”
    That afternoon, a school of flying fish surrounded the three whale-boats. Four of the fish hit the sails of Chase’s boat. One fell at the first mate’s feet and, instinctively, he devoured it whole, scales and all. As the rest of the crew scrambled for the other three fish, Chase found himself inclined to laugh for the first time since the sinking of the Essex at “the ludicrous and almost desperate efforts of my five companions, who each sought to get a fish.” The first mate might insist on the disciplined sharing of the bread and water, but a different standard prevailed when it came to windfalls such as flying fish—then, it was every man for himself.
    The next day the wind dropped to almost nothing, and Chase proposed that they eat their second tortoise. As had happened eleven days earlier, the “luxuriant repast . . . invigorated our bodies, and gave a fresh flow to our spirits.” Over the next three days, the wind remained light. The temperature climbed and the men languished beneath a cloudless sky. “[H]aving no way of screening ourselves from [the sun’s] piercing rays,” Nickerson wrote, “our suffering became most intolerable as our short allowance of water was barely enough to support life.”
    On Wednesday, December 13, the wind sprang out of an unexpected direction—the north—bringing with it “a most welcome and unlooked for relief.” It was now possible to steer directly for South America. Their noon observation revealed that they had barely reached latitude 21° south, putting them at least five degrees (or three hundred nautical miles) from the band of light variable winds that they hoped would propel them east. But the officers chose to believe that they had “run out of the trade-winds, and had got into the variables, and should, in all probability, reach the land many days sooner than we expected.”
    When the northerly breeze vanished the following day, they were devastated: “But alas! Our anticipations were but a dream, from which we shortly experienced a cruel awaking.” The men’s gloomy reflections grew even darker as the calm persisted for three more days, baking them beneath a blinding, unyielding sun: “The extreme oppression of the weather, the sudden and unexpected prostration of our hopes, and the consequent dejection of our spirits, set us again to thinking, and filled our souls with fearful and melancholy forebodings.”
    By December 14, the twenty-third day since leaving